Successful business websites

Web Studio. Creating websites that work. Well.

As a business, you need a website that is user friendly and efficient. One that’s compelling to use and one that looks great on tablets and mobiles. Dee Stevens runs a WordPress Web Studio in Guildford offering web design and management services to clients who want successful websites.

As a client, you can expect the latest best practices in website technologies to be brought straight to you. You’ll find that your business needs are understood. Dee’s enthusiasm and motivation will bring you the technical solutions you need to help make your website more successful.

It’s not just all about the design

Imagine that the internet is a huge collection of books in a library. But differently from normal libraries on the ground, imagine that there are invisible links, or connections, or pieces of string running from one book to another. What a cob web! Then, imagine that there’s a fast computer which has compiled an index to all of these books. So, all you have to do when you come in to the library and to find the information you want, is to go to the index and look it up and you’ll be guided straight to the book you need. And then from that book, you’ll be guided by the links to many other books in the library.

Well, that would work, so long as you could fight your way through all those strings, or links, between one book and another! And when you get to the book hopefully you’ll be greeted by a fine book jacket, some decent illustrations and easy-to-read copy.

Although rather a messy analogy, this is how the internet is built. There’s no point having a beautiful book tucked away in the corner which the great computerised-indexing-machine can’t get to. And it’s no good having same book with no links out to any other book and no links in. Being an isolated, beautiful, book might be pretty, but no one’s going to find it.

The great-computerised-indexing-machine needs to know about the book contents, in detail, in order to get its info back up to its index and out to you, the library-visitor. To get hold of this, it needs to be able to crawl through all the pages of the book and understand which pages the author thinks are the most important. It does this via a reasonably sophisticated degree of semantic understanding of the text and images, while spotting which threads lead where.

Maybe you’ve heard about this before, but in more technical terms. You’ll have heard of ‘site structure’ which is very important for SEO and is all about hierarchy of the pages, or the internal links within the website. (Books are definitely not hierarchical don’t tend to ‘link’ within a book, unless they make references via other page numbers.)You might have heard that UX is important. UX is the User’s eXperience and considers how easily the user can move around the website and how they move differently on a mobile version compared to a desktop or tablet version.

Have you heard of mobile responsiveness? These are the checks we make that the distance between click points is big enough (for your finger or thumb) and that images are not taking up too much valuable space on the tiny mobile screen.

What about mobile first indexing? This is when google will index and rank the mobile contents of a website in preference to previous versions. Google is giving priority to those websites in its index which perform well on mobile.

And security. The user wants to know that data transfer is running along safe channels, so SSL certificates giving the https:// address are a must.

Who is Dee Stevens?

Dee has a technical background in software development and customer support. She started her IT career working on advertising systems for The Independent Newspaper in the 1980s and switched to working with PC networks when they hit the inside of offices late 80s / early 90s. She then spent 5 years in network administration and technical support in the UK retail banking and insurance sectors.

Dee has been a business analyst, working with clients to provide computerised solutions to their business requirements, and most recently, working with small and medium sized businesses to bring their digital publishing (websites) to rude health.